5 Days in Sarajevo

The city started here. Isa-beg Isaković, the Ottoman governor, built a han (inn) and a row of shops in 1462, and a market town grew around them. Baščaršija is Turkish for "main market", and the lanes are still named after the crafts that filled them: Kazandžiluk for the coppersmiths, Čizmedžiluk for the boot makers, Bravadžiluk for the blacksmiths. Over a thousand shops are left today, by the tourist board's count.

The wooden fountain in the middle is the Sebilj. The first one was built in 1753 and burned in 1852, and the Austro-Hungarian architect Alexander Wittek, who also worked on tomorrow's City Hall, rebuilt it in 1891 in the Ottoman style. Legend says whoever drinks from it will return to Sarajevo. It's the most photographed corner in the city and a working market, where hand-made copper sits next to imported souvenirs. Be here by 9 for the empty version, because by 11 the groups arrive.

A few minutes west is the mosque that holds the old town together. Gazi Husrev-beg, the Ottoman governor of Bosnia, paid for it in 1530 and is buried in its garden. It's the largest historic mosque in the country. He built a whole district around it: a medresa (school), a library, a covered market, the Morića Han caravanserai (the only surviving one in the city) and the clock tower.

Non-Muslim visitors are welcome in the courtyard and, outside prayer times, inside (ask at the gate about any fee). Cover your shoulders and knees, take your shoes off, and women should bring a scarf. Visits pause for prayers, and on Fridays the midday one is the main service, so come in the morning. Then notice how close everything is: the Old Orthodox Church (first mentioned in 1539) is a short walk away, the Jewish Museum in the old synagogue (built 1581-87) is next to it, and the Catholic cathedral is ten minutes west.

Kazandžiluk is the coppersmiths' lane, one of the oldest streets in the city, and you hear it before you see it: hammers on metal. The workshops make džezve (the long-handled coffee pots), tiny cups, trays and plates, and some craftsmen engrave deactivated shells and bullets from the 1990s into vases and pens, which is the siege sold as a souvenir. Close by stands the Brusa Bezistan, a covered market from 1551 and now a museum.

Then sit down for the real thing. Bosnian coffee comes in its own džezva with a small cup, a sugar cube and often a piece of rahat-lokum (Turkish delight). Let the grounds settle and don't hurry: the Sarajevo word is merak, pleasure taken slowly. The coffee houses along Kazandžiluk and Čizmedžiluk all do it the same way.

Bravadžiluk, the old blacksmiths' street, is now the street of grilled meat. Sarajevo ćevapi are small finger-shaped sausages of minced beef, grilled over charcoal and served in a somun, the soft flat bread, with raw onion and kajmak, a salty cream. The grill houses took their present form in the middle of the 20th century.

Željo (Kundurdžiluk 19) is the biggest name and has the longest queue, and Hodžić (Bravadžiluk 34) is its smaller rival. Locals argue about which is better, and you'll lose the argument either way. Ferhatović, a family business since 1957, sells them by the petica: five pieces for 7 KM, ten for 14 KM.

Walk north up the hill to Logavina. Svrzo's House (Svrzina kuća) is a late-18th-century Muslim family home that shows how a well-off household lived, with carved wood, rugs and brocade cushions rather than furniture. It's a branch of the Museum of Sarajevo, open 10:00-16:00 Monday to Friday and 10:00-15:00 on Saturday from October to May.

A few minutes away at Logavina 32 is the War Childhood Museum. It opened in 2017 and shows personal belongings given by people who were children during the war of the 1990s, each with a story. It's independent, and it won the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 2018. It's open daily 11 am to 7 pm, quiet and heavy: plan an hour and put something light afterwards.

The best view of the old town costs nothing and takes a 15-20 minute climb. Walk east along the river and up through Kovači, past the Martyrs' Memorial Cemetery, where victims of the 1992-95 war are buried, and so is the first president of independent Bosnia, Alija Izetbegović. Walk through quietly.

The Yellow Fortress (Žuta tabija) is a small bastion on the Vratnik walls, built in 1727-1739 and rebuilt several times, and there isn't much to see in it. The reason to come is the view: red roofs, minarets, the river and the hills. Sunset is around 4:10 pm in mid-December, 4:30 in mid-January and 5:15 in mid-February, so come up an hour earlier. The White Fortress is a further 600 m along the wall.

The name means House of Spite. The story goes that when the Austro-Hungarians built the new City Hall on the river's right bank in the 1890s, an old man named Benderija refused to sell the house on the spot. He agreed to go only if the house was moved, piece by piece, to the other side of the river, and he was paid a sack of gold coins. The house was rebuilt across the Miljacka and became a symbol of Bosnian stubbornness, inat. It has been a restaurant since 1997.

The setting is the point: low tables, sofas, wood and copper, the river outside. Order Begova čorba or bosanski lonac, and look across the water at tomorrow's first stop, the City Hall.

The biggest Austro-Hungarian building in the city and its saddest. It opened as the city hall on 20 April 1896, a Moorish-style palace that three architects worked on in turn. On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were received here, and soon after leaving it both were shot. From 1949 it housed the National and University Library, and in the night of 25 to 26 August 1992 shells set it on fire. The City Hall puts the loss at around two million books, articles and periodicals. It was restored in stages from 1996 and reopened in 2014, the centenary year of the assassination. It's open daily 9 am to 5 pm except during events.

Five minutes west along the river is the Latin Bridge, the oldest preserved bridge in the city. On 28 June 1914 the Archduke's motorcade was driving along the river quay when Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb at 10:10 am; it bounced off the car and wounded people in the next one. After the reception at the City Hall, the couple decided to visit the wounded in hospital, but the cars ahead turned into a side street and the driver followed. Gavrilo Princip, waiting in front of Schiller's delicatessen, stepped forward and shot both of them.

That corner is now the Museum Sarajevo 1878-1918, which tells the story of life under Austrian rule, with Princip's footprints marked on the pavement outside. The tale that Princip ate a sandwich at Schiller's just before is a myth from a 2001 novel. He was a Bosnian Serb student and a member of Young Bosnia, which wanted to end Austro-Hungarian rule and create a South Slav state. In Yugoslav times this bridge carried his name, and the name returned to Latin Bridge after the 1990s war. Some still see him as a hero, others as a terrorist. The museum is closed on Sundays and open 10:00-15:00 on Saturdays from October to May.

An aščinica is the old-style canteen restaurant: pots on the counter, no fancy menu, you point at what you want. Look for Begova čorba (a creamy chicken soup), dolma (stuffed vine leaves or onions), bosanski lonac (the slow-cooked Bosnian pot) and, if it's on, klepe, the dumplings with garlic yogurt.

Aščinica Hadžibajrić (Čurčiluk veliki 59) and Aščinica ASDŽ (Mali Čurčiluk 3) are both on the tourist board's 2026 list and a short walk from the bridge. At ASDŽ you order at the counter and pay by the plate. Finish with a tufahija, a poached apple stuffed with walnuts, or baklava at a pastry shop such as the Baklava dućan (Čizmedžiluk 20).

Walk west along Ferhadija, the pedestrian street, and you cross from the Ottoman city into the Austrian one without noticing. The Eternal Flame was dedicated on 6 April 1946, a year after the city's liberation, to the military and civilian dead of the Second World War; the siege began around the same date in 1992, so people remember its victims here too.

The Sacred Heart Cathedral, a few minutes on, is the largest in the country: neo-Gothic, planned by Josip Vancaš and modeled on the Notre-Dame in Dijon. Next door is the Gallery 11/07/95, a memorial to the more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys killed at Srebrenica in July 1995, which the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice both ruled to be genocide; some politicians in Serbia and Republika Srpska still reject that word. It's open daily 9 am to 9 pm; photographs aren't allowed, and visitors speak quietly. Near the Markale market, look down for the Sarajevo Roses: mortar scars filled with red resin, about 200 in the city, each where at least three people died. One marks the first Markale shelling of 5 February 1994, which killed 68; the tribunal concluded the shell came from Serb-held positions, which the Serb side disputed.

It's a walk of under 2 km, or a short tram ride, along the wide boulevard of the modern center. During the siege it was nicknamed Sniper Alley, because civilians crossing it were shot at. Today Zmaja od Bosne is a busy street of glass towers and tram stops, and that's the point.

The siege lasted from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, 1,425 days. The city was first surrounded by the Yugoslav People's Army and then by the Army of Republika Srpska, and the defenders inside were far worse armed. Studies count 13,952 people killed, 5,434 of them civilians. The tribunal in The Hague convicted Stanislav Galić, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić of crimes that include the siege, and all three received life sentences. The rest of the day is lighter: a museum and dinner on a hillside.

The museum's best-known object is the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish manuscript made in Spain around 1350 and sold to the museum in 1894 by Joseph Kohen. It survived the Second World War because the librarian Derviš Korkut smuggled it away from the German authorities and had it hidden in a mosque in a village on Bjelašnica, the mountain you'll be on in three days. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register in 2017.

Know what you'll see: the museum says the Haggadah is kept in a secure space and shown on special occasions, so ask at the desk before planning around it. The rest is an old-style national museum that took heavy shelling in 1992 and has not fully recovered. It's open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 7 pm.

Kibe opened in March 1988 on a hillside above the center, and the draw is the panorama of the city from seven dining rooms. The menu is Bosnian dishes and lamb roasted on a spit (janjetina sa ražnja), with guitarists at the tables. It's more polished than the aščinice, and priced like it, but the view is the point. It's a short taxi ride from the center, and worth booking.

Start where locals do. In Bosnia burek is the meat-filled spiral of thin pastry; the same pastry with cheese is sirnica, with spinach and cheese zeljanica, with potato krompiruša, and all of them together are called pita. Ask a baker for "burek with cheese" and you'll get a smile and a correction. It's eaten for breakfast with plain jogurt.

The tourist board's list of buregdžinice includes Sač, Bosna, Oklagija and Dervoz. Sunday hours aren't posted, so ask your hotel which one is open nearby. Be on the cable car by 9:30: the lower station is a short walk from the City Hall.

The cable car first opened in 1959 and ran until 1989, when repairs were banned; the war of the 1990s destroyed it. The rebuilt one, with 33 cabins including five in the colors of the Olympic rings, opened on 6 April 2018. The nine-minute ride from Bistrik climbs above the old town and opens up the valley and the mountains behind.

The top is a viewpoint with a café; the real show is the Olympic site in the forest next to it. A return ticket is 30 KM (one way 20 KM) on the operator's September 2026 price list, and children up to 7 ride free.

The bobsled and luge track was built in 1981-82 for the 1984 Games and used for races until the war. During the siege Trebević was on the front line and the track was used as a military position. Afterwards it became a canvas for graffiti and a route for mountain bikers. Demining and limited restoration began in 2014, but the start houses and the refrigeration plant are gone.

Today it's a free open-air gallery and one of the strangest walks in Europe: a concrete ice channel winding through the forest, past turns called Omega, Hairpin and Labyrinth. The start is a short walk (about 200 m on the map) from the upper cable car station. Wear shoes with grip: the concrete is slick when wet and icy in winter.

By the spring of 1993 Sarajevo was sealed off. The airport was held by the United Nations and could be used by neither side, so the city's defenders dug a tunnel under the runway to link the besieged district of Dobrinja with Butmir, on territory held by the Bosnian army. It was dug by hand between March and June 1993 and first used on 1 July. About 340 meters of it were true tunnel, with covered trenches at both ends, and it carried food, war supplies, aid and people, and later oil, electricity and a small railway.

The museum is in the Kolar family's house, which held the Butmir entrance. You can walk 25 meters of original tunnel and 100 meters of a rebuilt section, and there's an exhibition and a film. It's small, and the original 25 meters is the point. Take a taxi and agree the fare first; the alternative is tram line 3 to Ilidža and a local bus.

Back on Zmaja od Bosne, the Historical Museum is a Yugoslav modernist building designed by Boris Magaš and Edo Šmidihen. Its exhibition, Besieged Sarajevo, reconstructs daily life in the city during the 1990s, and it's the place to finish the siege story that the Tunnel starts. It's open daily 9 am to 7 pm, and the ticket price isn't published online. If the Tunnel ran late, skip this and have dinner in Baščaršija.

Jahorina's village is called Poljice, and the Poljice gondola starts in it. The resort has 18 lifts and 54 km of pistes. Day lifts open at 9 am, and you buy the pass at the ticket office in the village or in the web shop. The second gondola is Partizan.

A day pass is 98 KM for adults (14-64) and 83 KM for children (6-13), under-6s ski free with an adult, and a 4-hour pass is 80 KM. That's about 1.5 times a Bjelašnica day pass for roughly four times the pistes. The ski info page lists which lifts and pistes are open each day, with the snow depth.

Take the six-seat Ogorjelica chair up the mountain. Ogorjelica itself is the highest summit at 1,916 m, above the top lift. Jahorina hosted the women's alpine races of the 1984 Winter Olympics, and some pistes still carry the Olympic names. The resort numbers its runs 1 to 9: 1 is Poljice, under the gondola, 2 and 3 are Ogorjelica, 5 is Olimpik and 9 is Trnovo.

Honest verdict: it's an intermediate's mountain, with 25 km of easy runs, 24 of intermediate and only about 3 km of difficult slopes. Warm up on Poljice, cruise the long Ogorjelica runs, and try Olimpik (5). Experts will run out of steep terrain by early afternoon. Trnovo has a 3,000 m2 snowboard park.

The Olimpijski Bar stands at the top of the mountain at 1,879 m, a 700 m2 chalet with a view over the reservoir lake and the peaks. The kitchen uses home products: pura s kajmakom (cornmeal with kajmak), uštipci (fried dough), sarma, ćevapi, pies and, for dessert, baklava and tufahija. It also hosts more than 40 events a year, including après-ski parties.

Eat at 11:45 or 1:45 to miss the rush. The lifts close at 4 pm and you have to ski back down, so don't start the après-ski at 3:30. It's a good place to try tufahija, the poached apple with walnuts, in the snow.

Between the day and night sessions, from 4 to 6 pm, the Poljice drag lift tows sleds to the top of run 7, a 600 m track, 5 m wide. A ride with sled and lift costs 20 KM. Then the floodlights come on.

Night skiing runs from 6 to 9 pm on the lit Novak Đoković and Prača pistes, which the resort has connected so they can be skied as one. The night lifts are the two gondolas, the Trnovo and Skočine chairs and the Poljice drag lift. Lights aren't on every night, so check the night ski info page that morning.

Koliba is the restaurant at the base station of the Poljice gondola, where the après-ski crowd tends to end up. Eat what the mountain does well: grilled meat, a pie, a bosanski lonac if it's on, and a rakija to finish.

The road back to Sarajevo is 28 km through Pale, in the dark, possibly with snow. If you've been drinking, don't drive. Agree a taxi fare before you set off, or sleep up here (see "Where to stay").

Babin Do is the base at 1,267 m, a plateau with a few hotels, konobas and the lift stations. The resort has eight pistes and five children's slopes, three cable lifts and five drag lifts, and about 14 km of slopes: 4.9 km easy, 7.8 intermediate and 1.6 difficult. The slopes have snow cannons.

The web shop day pass is 65 KM for adults, 50 KM for teens and 41 KM for children (6-12); at the counter adults pay 69 KM. Everyone needs a 5 KM card, refundable at the kiosk machines. Be at the base early: the lift capacity is modest, and on a busy day the six-seat chair is where a queue forms.

The upper lifts reach 2,067 m, the highest ski area in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The men's alpine races of the 1984 Olympics were held here. In the giant slalom on 14 February 1984, the Slovenian skier Jure Franko won silver, Yugoslavia's first Winter Olympic medal and its only one at those Games. The medal ceremony moved to the square at Skenderija in the city, where about 20,000 people turned up, and the slogan became Volimo Jureka više od bureka, "We love Jureks more than burek".

In 1894 the Austro-Hungarians built a meteorological observatory on the summit, the only one in the Balkans. It was destroyed in 1993. The Haggadah story from yesterday's museum stop took place in a village on this mountain. Some areas of the mountain were fought over in the 1990s and still carry a mine risk, so stay on the pistes and marked trails.

The operator's tourism portal lists Konoba Vučko, Restaurant Mechava and the restaurant of Hotel Han among the places to eat at Babin Do. Vučko, "the little wolf", was the mascot of the 1984 Games. A konoba is a rustic tavern, and at 1,300 m you want hot food: order the hot dish, not the sandwich. Check on the day that the place you want is open, because smaller mountain restaurants close in poor weather or when the snow is thin.

Part of the downhill course is lit. The operator's March 2026 schedule listed night skiing on Saturday and Sunday only, with the lifts running 6:30-8:30 pm, so on a Tuesday expect none and confirm with the resort. The lit run is about 750 m long with a moderate slope, so it's a warm-down, not a race. On a Tuesday the better evening is back in Baščaršija. The web shop sells a night ticket for 46 KM for adults and 22 KM for children (6-12), and a half-day ticket from 1 pm costs 31 KM, which is the better deal if you only want the afternoon.